Backlinks are an essential component for a successful SEO strategy. They represent very effective ranking factors that boost the credibility of your website.
When someone links to your website, they are sending a signal to search engines to see you as a reliable source of content. They are therefore particularly valuable for SEO because they represent the trust placed in a website.
A 2018 study conducted by Ahrefs analyzed 920 million websites and revealed a key element of how Google’s search engine algorithm works. The study found that while other factors weigh heavily in the balance, inbound links are the most influential factor that affects ranking in the SERPs.
Among the websites studied, an increase in organic traffic was directly correlated to the number of backlinks. The increase in the number of backlinks is accompanied by an increase in organic traffic recorded by the website.
Originally, backlinks were used as the primary ranking factor. However, this has led to black-hat SEO strategies to artificially boost rankings in SERPs through pseudo-links.
When Google became aware of these actions, it updated the algorithm to assess the “quality” of the link more than the quantity of backlinks.
Now, backlinks only improve your SEO efforts if they come from high-quality websites with respectable domain authority. This explains why SEO best practices place more emphasis on the quality of backlinks than on their quantity.
To get an overview of the backlink quality of your website and that of your competitors, you need to perform a backlink analysis. This involves carefully reviewing the pages and domains that link to a website and optimizing your link portfolio to move up the SERPs.
Let’s take a closer look at inbound link analysis.
What is backlink analysis?
Inbound link analysis is the foundation of a successful link building strategy. Without it, you’re essentially ignoring one of the most effective off-page SEO optimization strategies
If your website has inbound links from a high authority site, they can help build your credibility and improve your rankings on search engine results pages. But how do you analyze the quality of the websites that link to your site?
This is where an inbound link analysis comes in. Not only does it let you see which sites are linking to your content, but inbound link analysis also helps you identify spammy links that may be affecting your website’s performance.
It’s also a good idea to check the inbound links your competitors’ sites are receiving to find new ideas and opportunities. This could help you discover new target domains that you haven’t worked with before, and these domains could be useful to you during your link building campaigns.
Now that you know why backlinks are great for SEO, let’s find out how to integrate a backlink analysis strategy into the technical SEO of your website.
Integrate backlink analysis into your search engine optimization strategy
To perform an accurate backlink analysis, you need to follow these steps:
Examine all the links on your website
Access and inspect all outbound links from your website. To do this, you will need a backlink analysis tool.
OnCrawl offers a very advanced SEO dashboard that displays all your inbound link information on a dashboard. On the other hand, its InRank function allows you to better understand the internal links of your website by evaluating the popularity of each link.
With OnCrawl, you can gather all this and other crawl data along with logs to assess the correlation between your backlinks and organic visits. You can then use the export feature to move your link data without any volume restrictions.
Assess the backlink profile
Once you have gathered all your backlinks data in one place, analyze the links as a whole to determine the strength and weaknesses of your profile as a whole.
In addition to telling you where your links are coming from, an inbound link analysis can also help you predict link issues and manage your inbound link profiles.
With this information, you can easily identify the domain authority of the backlinks and distribute them evenly across the website. It is best if high authority domains combined with lower authority domains link to your site without any influence.
Larry Kim , the founder of WordStream, called targeting sites with high influence a “smart move” but also said it’s always best to dig a little deeper before taking the next step. Simply put, a natural backlink profile can include links from low and medium influence sites to build trust and credibility for your website.
You should also check the link speed to observe any increase or decrease in links and referring domains.
Detect unnatural links
Unnatural links will result in a Google penalty before you can even figure out what happened!
These bad or spam links link your site to low quality directories. These may be added links that you include in your content without the webmaster’s consent.
Now, to detect unnatural links, you can either manually review sites or sift through backlinks using an analysis tool. If your site has unnatural backlinks, you will come across irrelevant sites or spam sites that offer no real content and contain irrelevant pages.
You can also observe the anchor text distribution for any suspicious anchor text indicating links that are unrelated to your site.
Assess the risk of penalties
At this point, it would be best to clean up your backlink profile to remove any traces of black hat SEO that could affect your website’s ranking and credibility.
According to Google, any link that alters a site’s ranking in Google will be considered part of a linking scheme and as breaking the prescribed rules.
If the linked website uses any of the following strategies , it should be classified as an unnatural link and eliminated:
Link schemes
Hidden texts
Inauthentic Content
Keyword stuffing
Malware
Cloaking
Keep all of these guidelines in mind to ensure that your website is not at risk of being penalized.